Re: [RFC PATCH for 4.18] rseq: use __u64 for rseq_cs fields, validate user inputs

[Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>]

----- On Jul 2, 2018, at 7:22 PM, Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 4:17 PM Mathieu Desnoyers
> <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> wrote:
>>
>> Are there any kind of guarantees that a __u64 update on a 32-bit architecture
>> won't be torn into something daft like byte-per-byte stores when performed
>> from C code ?
> 
> Guarantees? No. Not that there are any guarantees that the same won't
> happen for a plain 32-bit value either.
> 
> Will compilers generate that kind of code? I guess some crazy compiler
> could simply be really bad at handling 64-bit values, and just happen
> to handle 32-bit values better. So in that sense a 64-bit entity is
> certainly a bit riskier. But that would be a really bad compiler, I
> have to say.

Given that the only C code updating that field is rseq_prepare_unload()
(the rest is only ever updated from assembly), we could perhaps mandate
that user-space always update it from assembly, and therefore implement
rseq_prepare_unload as an inline asm which clears rseq->rseq_cs.

Does it sound better than the LINUX_FIELD_u32_u64 macro ?

Thanks,

Mathieu


-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com